Even Though It Has A Subject, This Post Has No Real Subject

[ontology]

MOTHER (cooking upstairs): Could you get me some crushed tomatoes, tomato paste, and red wine?
BANUI: Er, I can't find the red wine. All I can find is sherry, vodka, rum, and tequila!

Er. No. It's not what you think. My father is a former baker. I swear. The vodka is probably three years old. All the same, we do have this little cache of alcoholic beverages above the kitchen counter, which amuses me. (Why is the rum gone?)

I wrote a poem today and am trying to decide what I think of it. I'm really trying to make my poetry different--after I wrote "The Poet in Exile", it made me see more clearly why it worked so well when most of my other poems haven't. And um, no, you really don't want to see the bad, almost quasi-gothic tripe I was writing a year ago. Sure, most of it was honest, but it bubbled with angst, and my metaphors were, um...nausea-inducing: lots of "shattered" and "burning" and "bleeding" and such. This is why I have Ian commenting sardonically about some of his students' poetry in a future, unwritten tuesday_skyline vignette. It's a way to exorcise the old demons of Bad Writing. I also have something bouncing about in my head involving Ian and Greek, but...er, yeah. My Skyline muse seems to be going wonky these days. I have a bunch of little things that I keep scribbling, and I like what they're doing, but I don't like what I'm doing with them, if that makes any sense. 

Also, I read the infamous I Kissed Dating Goodbye t'other day, and John Holzmann's Dating With Integrity and might actually come out with a somewhat serious post eventually on my views on romantic relationships, teenage, mine, and otherwise. (Don't take that as me saying that I actually have a relationship that I'm not telling you about. Eurgh.) Brief verdict: I Kissed Dating Goodbye had the best cover, but Joshua Harris isn't the best writer. I agreed with a lot of what he said, but the point remains that he is an unmarried (at least at the time of writing) twenty-something. Dating With Integrity: much better written, especially since John Holzmann is obsessed with research. I didn't agree with everything he said, but he also said in his foreword that I probably wouldn't, which made me smile. Also: John Holzmann is one of the coolest people, ever. Besides the fact that he and his wife founded Sonlight Curriculum, even. He is also much, much, much smarter than I will ever be, but that's okay. I would not be half as intelligent as I am if it weren't for him. (Nor would I recognise bias half so well!)

Comments

[princess-alya.livejournal.com]

I agreed with Josh Harris more than Holzmann. You should read Boy Meets Girl... it's better than IKDG.

*waves* Yeah, I actually looked at LJ again. :)

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

I should...I much prefer the opinion of a bloke who's been-there-done-that to a bloke who's still looking about. Of course, I already have very opinionated views on the subject, so any books I read merely serve to give me food for thought and more of a concrete idea as to what I believe. ^-^ (Er. I'm very opinionated. I'm sure you had no idea. :p)

[angelbluekisses.livejournal.com]

Josh Harris did actually get married (that's what Boy Meets Girl is about), and I think it was by following what he preached...But yeah. lol.

I want to read Dating with Integrity but there's very little chance I'll actually get a hold of a copy...ah well.

[ressie-noldo.livejournal.com]

*stays well away from relationship books, due to not wanting to mess up her social life any more than it is already*



And hey, I still use 'shattered' and 'burning' and stuff. Admittedly, not every other sentence, but they make a prominent appearance.



As for the Alcohol Situation, that happens to us a fair bit. (Well, my mum won't touch it, Dad drinks occasionally; but somehow, there always seems to be more beer/rum/whisky/whatever in the house than would be required for a few cohorts of very thirsty soldiers. Even with bawdy jokes and over-drinking.) Somehow, though, whenever Mum's opening the cupboard to get some innocent vinegar or something, she will find a bottle of Jack Daniels, and of course my grandfather will see this and get into an enormous sulk. My house is amusing.

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

Yes, but so far as I'm aware, you don't write about getting paper-cuts from your bleeding soul (in a slightly less amusing and more "poetic" manner). At least not anywhere where anyone is likely to see it. Eurgh. I am off angst-poetry FOREVER. (Except not. Because I know it'll happen again, eventually; hopefully by that time it'll manage to be somewhat less mind-exploding.)

Hee. Actually, my father does love his fine wines and beers and, er, ale, so we do also have a case or beer in the fridge and a bottle of wine in one of the cupboards, generally . Ale gives me bad memories, as I accidentally had a swig of it once. It was in a canteen, and I thought it was water. We were at a music festival, and I'd been dancing and was tremendously hot and thirsty and had left my canteen back at the main stage, so I reached for his. He was just coming back from the bathroom or he would have stopped me. I wish he had. Ale is horrid, horrid, noxious muck: it tastes like just having vomited. I can't understand why he likes the stuff. He said, "Er, you weren't supposed to drink that." No, really? I may get a taste for wine someday (although my dad is really, really snobby about wine, and beer, and coffee, so if I do get a taste for it, it'll be something ridiculously expensive), but I have absolutely no desire to try any alcohol again. At least not for ten years or so. Even if it does come in pints. :p

[avonleigh.livejournal.com]

It's been years since I read IKDG, and I've never heard of Holzmann, but while IKDG definitely helped lay a foundatiion for me, the book I found the best was 'When God Writes Your Love Story' by Eric and Leslie Ludy. I'd highly recommend that you read it if you haven't yet [and while you're at it, pick up copies of Leslie's 'Authentic Beauty' and Stasi Eldredge's 'Captivating'... if you haven't read them yet].

[mrkgnao.livejournal.com]

I am a random wanderer - and thus did I wander here, drawn by TS Eliot iconage - err... yes. Um, I have no idea quite how I got here or what I'm doing here but I started reading randomly and was muchly entertained.

As far as the alcohol is concerned, I think your household is safe as long as there is genuine alcohol in your drinks cabinet and not just a small, half-empty bottle of window polish, abandoned and forlorn.

And I also firmly believe that quasi-gothic tripe replete shattering heart blood is an important stage in poetic development. Hell, if you ask me Shelley never got out of it! ;)

[faeriemaiden.livejournal.com]

Hullo, random wanderer! Glad that you found something of interest amongst my arbitrary meanderings. ^-^

At least I'm not like Anne Shirley and get friends drunk by mistaking alchohol for something perfectly innocuous!However, several of the bottles are extremely pretty, especially the sherry. (It's Amontillado sherry, too, which reminded me of Poe and made me smile. Perhaps Poe shouldn't make me smile...)

Regarding the last, I suppose that one needs to know what not to write almost as much as one needs to know what to write. In ten years my old poetry will be far enough removed from myself that it will be genuinely amusing to me; at the moment it's simply embarrassing. My first novel, which I wrote at the age of ten, has finally gotten to the stage where I can be amused at it instead of constantly wanting to stab myself with my own pen. (Unfortunately, most of it was lost in a hard-drive crash, so the plot twist that I didn't even understand when I wrote it is no longer existant.)

[lady-moriel.livejournal.com]

Cooking sherry! *cracks up*

This has nothing to do with anything, but did you pick "wonky" up from me, or were you saying it before? ^-^

I do remember your old stuff being good, though whether that says more about my taste or your writing is beyond me. I don't think most of them were horrible, anyway, though I would agree that "The Poet in Exile" is consciously different and very, very good (and you need to send it somewhere! Yes you do!). But at least your Angst in Verse Form was better than the poetry I was writing when I was...well, how old was I? The worst of it was in 1999 - 2001, probably, so I would have been...between twelve and fourteen. Yeah, I went through a phase where I decided everything had to be POETRY, which basically meant I just threw words up on the screen and put line breaks in artistic places. They were BAD. And I'm glad the vast majority of them never saw the light anywhere besides my own computer.

I read I Kissed Dating Goodbye a while ago--rather, had it read to me, I think. Don't remember a whole lot of it, in all honesty, except that I found it odd how he was advising people on all this stuff when he...didn't really have the experience necessary to do so. (And he claimed to have had the original Room of Filing Cabinets and DOOM dream, which I find a bit unlikely, since it appears EVERYWHERE, especially in forwards.)